The Louisiana Democrat., 1887-02-09
SWEDISH KNAcKBRoD.
Tho staff Of Life in One Of sweden's Il
toric Mining Towns.

| Tho staff of Life in One of sweden's His
toric Mining Towns.
At FaIun we found the average
Swedish inn, with a cherries dining
| room. where each table was piled high
with knackbrod, enough on each table
to feed twenty soldiers. The knack-
brod is national institution and
| sign surer than any sign post OF front
ier stone to tell one that he is in SWe-
den. 1t is made of rye or barley flour,
| mixed with potatoes and quantities OF
carroway seeds; is baked in thin sheets
foot in diameter, with a hole in, the
| middle, and through this hole the mar
ket women run a string and carry
it around for sale. In the bread
market at Stockholm they fasten these
strings of knackbrod to their shoulder
yokes in piles that reach from the
yokes nearly to the ground. To an un-
appreciative palate it tastes quite as
much as it looks like dog biscuit and is
tougher than any thing else the human
teeth struggle with. Beside the knack-
brod, the Swedes offer you many va
rieties of sweet bread full of carroway
seeds, and with the morning coffee give
you plates of these fancy kickshaws,
but never any plain white bread, and
the coffee at Falun was something to
make one shiver with disgust. The un-
fortunate one who, following Mark
Twain's old plan of saying: 'If this is
coffee, give me tea; and if this is tea,
give me coffee, and grandly ordered the
coffee pot off the table, was sure she
was poisoned when she had rashly swal-
lowed some of the tea. Then we
mourned that we had ever let ourselves
be jolted more than a hundred miles
from Upsala to this dull, dead, stupid
provincial town of Falun, and an En-
glishman at an adjoining table further
consoled us by telling our American
miner that the Falun copper mines
were not interesting and not worth
seeing at all. ''There're all under
ground, you know" said the English
man, "and you have to have man
| carry torches to see it. There's moth
ing picturesque there at all. ;"
Despite the Englishman's kind infor-
nation that the mines were under
ground, we made ready and drove
through the dreary line of villages that
| combine to make the town of Falun to
the grufstuga, or mining office. The
whole region was sere and desolate,
covered with dump heaps, Stag and
refuse from the mine, and there was
enough sulphur and vitriol in the ar
to give us unpleasant sensations in our
throats, although the inhabitants claim
that these fumes have kept off cholera
and pestilence in times past. This Falu
rufra Falun m;ne), or stora koppar-
berget (great copper mountain), has
the other high sounding titles of the
purse" and the Treasury of Swe-
den," and its yield was once equal to
| the revenues of the Eronu. The
mine has been worked for over five
hundred years, as is known by
records, and all prehistoric mu-
seums show how rich the bronze age
was in Scandinavia, where the deposits
of Falun and Oster Gosland only could
supply the sayages of those earlier cen.
turies. By the guides statistics the
mine regularly yielded 1892 tons o1
copper annually during the seventeenth
century. 1t now yields less than 8o(
tons annually. The company owning
the mine numbered 1900 proprietors in
1916, and each of these shares is now
worth little over 800 in our money.
To any one who even knows about the
copper mines of Lake Superior this
Falun mine, with its poor ore, exhausted
veins and high sounding titles, seems q
small thing; and after seeing American
mining methods and machinery, the
diamond drills, electric lights and work
going on night and day by hundreds Of
miners, the Treasury Of Sweden
seems poor and trifing affair
Rusanaab. IN ST. Louis Globe Democrat